Menlo Worldwide Logistics, Southwest Airlines and The Emirates Group Honored for Innovative Transformation and Industry Leadership

Redwood Shores, Calif. –December 19, 2012

News Facts

Recognizing industry innovation and business leadership, Oracle honored Menlo Worldwide Logistics, Southwest Airlines, and The Emirates Group as winners of the 2012 Travel and Transportation Industry Excellence Awards, presented at Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco.

The annual awards recognize successful transformation and leadership in the travel and transportation industry.

Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines (Southwest)—which including its wholly owned subsidiary, AirTran Airways, serves 97 destinations in 41 states, District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and six international countries with a fleet of 698 Boeing jets, wanted to restructure and expand its customer loyalty program, Rapid Rewards®.

Southwest Airlines determined that its legacy information technology (IT) infrastructure could not support the company’s vision for an expanded program, and it looked to Oracle for a solution. Southwest used Oracle’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications as the foundation for its All New Rapid Rewards program.

Oracle CRM applications have enabled Southwest Airlines to gain a single view into all customer activity and interactions with the company, across all channels. It also has helped to streamline e-mail and other types of customer communications. By integrating the Oracle CRM solution with the company computer telephony integration environment, it can now identify customers based on their telephone numbers and immediately populate the agent’s desktop with the customer’s information before taking the call to improve the overall customer experience.

The company uses Oracle CRM to support an expanded Rapid Rewards program that includes no black out dates, availability of every seat for reward travel, variable earn and burn capabilities, and points that do not expire.

Customers have responded enthusiastically to the All New Rapid Rewards program, which was launched in March 2011. Southwest has achieved double-digit growth in new members over the last year. Through June 2012, the program generated more than $300 million in incremental revenue, as well as a 20 percent increase in new member acquisitions. In addition, Rapid Rewards partner revenues increased by 46 percent in the same period.

The Emirates Group

The Emirates Group, a global provider of aviation, travel, tourism and leisure services, is spearheaded by Emirates—one of the world’s fastest growing airlines. Mercator is the Emirates Group external IT operating unit, which both serves the company’s needs and provides IT services and solutions to other airlines.

In the early 90s, The Emirates Group realized that effective revenue accounting and enterprise performance management capabilities would be key to sustained growth. The company used Oracle Database and Oracle Developer Tools to build RAPID—a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for passenger, cargo and mail revenue accounting designed to provide airline performance metrics derived from operational data.

While RAPID was initially designed for use within the Emirates Group, mercator has subsequently begun to provide the scalable and robust solution via a variety of deployment models—hosted, on premise and fully outsourced—to more than 50 airlines around the globe.

Mercator chose Oracle’s Database as the foundation for RAPID because of its robustness, scalability and security. The company relies on Oracle’s Developer Tools to help it continuously and efficiently evolve the solution to meet the changing aviation industry and market needs.

RAPID has witnessed exponential growth over the past decade and is now a leading revenue accounting solution for the industry. The solution helps Emirates and other airlines to through proven, yet highly innovative revenue accounting processes, helps to improve cash flow through expanded visibility into receivables and helps to optimize profits through swift and accurate revenue earned determination. Furthermore RAPID helps to reduce revenue accounting overhead costs and boosts productivity through streamlined processes.

Menlo Worldwide Logistics

Menlo Worldwide Logistics, a leading provider of third party logistics (3PL), transportation management, freight brokerage and supply chain services across North America, 20 countries, and five continents, looked to create an enterprise wide transportation management platform to improve visibility and optimize value for its customers. It also looked to reduce maintenance costs associated with the disparate legacy systems.

The company standardized on the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Transportation Management, Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware to create a unified operating platform that supports multiple clients and services. By replacing five legacy transportation management platforms, the new system provides a cost effective technology solution that significantly improves visibility and functionality.

Launching the new platform was critical to enabling a tier-one truck original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to support its multi-billion dollar supply chain transformation initiative. Enabled by this technology platform, Menlo and its customer are driving significant savings in logistics costs and more efficiently managing more than $300 million in transportation spend for the OEM.

Supporting Quote

“Travel and transportation companies operate in an increasingly volatile industry, with unpredictable fuel costs, increased competition and growing compliance requirements. Innovation and operational excellence are the keys to continued profitability,” said Sundar Swaminathan, director of transportation industry strategy and marketing, Oracle. “The winners of Oracle’s 2012 Travel and Transportation Industry Excellence Awards demonstrate these qualities and show how ingenuity and the right technology can come together to enable enterprises to capitalize on new opportunities for growth.”

“Customers are driving how, when, and where they interact with brands and the Travel and Transportation Industry has to rapidly adapt and continue to innovate with new products and services to personalize the customer experience” said Vijay Anand, senior director, global lead, Travel and Transportation Oracle. “The winners of Oracle’s 2012 Travel and Transportation Industry Excellence Awards show how leaders are effectively using technology to address a broad range of challenges from transforming loyalty programs, to optimizing transportation, and enabling better revenue accounting.”

Supporting Resources

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